


The Sea's Most Distant

by xyai



Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-12
Updated: 2016-12-12
Packaged: 2018-09-08 00:24:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8822278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xyai/pseuds/xyai
Summary: The silence is a space to fill, but Jesper waits. Jesper, who hates waiting, waits for him.
Three months into running their merchant empire, a question asked and answered.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [torakowalski](https://archiveofourown.org/users/torakowalski/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! I hope you enjoy.

It’s true: Jesper has a very soothing baritone.

His voice is a good match for Inej’s words. He reads her letter as she might have herself: careful, solemn, serious. Across the room on the four-poster bed, Wylan wraps his arms around his knees, closes his eyes, and listens.

Inej is five weeks gone, set sail with her parents on _The Wraith_. These are the first words they’ve had of her since. She writes of clement weather and lucky winds, and reaching the gravel shores of west Ravka. She writes, and Jesper reads, of friends and family transformed by time, of faded memories made vivid again, and—

_I thought I knew how difficult it would be, to tell my Mama, my Papa, that their final destination was not my own. I think they understood when I said that home, for me, was not bound to our people, not anymore. But where I have known this for years, they have had days._

The words pass through Wylan like a soft exhale. He wonders how long it will be before she parts ways with her camp. Maybe she’s already left. He wouldn’t be surprised.

And if she had decided to stay?

No. Inej holds true to her beliefs like the moon to the sky, and if she means to unravel the slave trade, then it will be done. Her conviction burns fiercely enough that Wylan doesn’t think anything like comfort, or pleasure, will tempt her off her path. He couldn’t say the same about himself, could he?

The room has gone silent. Wylan opens his eyes to find Jesper looking at him, eyebrows raised.

“Tough crowd,” Jesper says.

“What?”

“You were shaking your head.”

“Oh,” Wylan says, bringing a hand to his face. Like that’s going to do anything. He drops his hand, but his cheeks are already warming. “I didn’t realize.”

“Was it something I said?”

“No! You didn’t—” Wylan stops. Jesper’s got a smirk going. Of course. “I was just thinking.”

Jesper’s smirk deepens. “Always a dangerous game, dearest.”

It’s been three months since they began this—arrangement. Enough time for Jesper to run through a disturbing number of pet names, enough time to sink into a daily rhythm of office and home, business and rest. Enough time to know that they are _something_ to each other, though Wylan doesn’t know what. They are an equation waiting to be defined.

 _I’m not your dearest_ , Wylan wants to say. _Or if I am, I don’t know what that means._ Instead, he says, “Keep reading. Please.”

He’s still not used to Jesper-unhurried, Jesper-out-of-danger, Jesper-in-repose. Three months before, he would have expected some kind of response. A joke, at least. But Jesper only looks at him, brief, before his eyes return to the letter in his hands. 

_I have the beginnings of a crew, and I set sail again tomorrow. Papa is calling me to dinner. There are children skipping rocks into the setting sun. I could almost imagine I was fourteen again, nothing changed._

_I will miss them. I already miss you both, and the rest of us._

_But I am ready._

Neither of them moves. In the quiet, Inej’s words sound and sound, like the tolling of bells.

“Inej,” Jesper says, shaking his head. “Damn. I miss her.”

Wylan nods. She wasn’t an obtrusive, or even frequent, presence in the mansion, but he’d grown accustomed to her anyway. He closes his eyes briefly and wishes her well. He misses her, he does. But he breathes against a new tremor in his chest, and it feels like something else.

“So,” Jesper says, from the corner. He’s leaning against the armoire, in a way that promises all the seductive charm he has to offer. “Do I get to come back to bed, now?”

“We were never _in_ bed,” Wylan protests, feeling his cheeks bloom with heat. He’d hoped, early on, that his blushing would stop once he learned to expect Jesper’s provocations. He’d hoped in vain. “Besides, _you_ put yourself on the other side of the room.”

“Only after you rejected my advances.”

“I wasn’t about to sit in your lap! Or let you sit in mine.”

Jesper appraises him, expression sly. With the same slyness, he pushes off the armoire and approaches. This bedroom, meant for a guest and now claimed by Wylan, is more than spacious enough, but like the rest of the mansion, it is furnished to excess. Wylan watches Jesper weave a graceful path through the crowd of side tables and armchairs and floor lamps. They’ve talked of selling off everything they don’t need, but it’s not going to happen until the demands of his father’s empire die down.

 _Not his empire_ , Wylan thinks. _Yours._ It’s a mistake he makes constantly.  

Jesper does not stop at the bed. Instead, he plunks down on a nearby settee, pats the cushion next to him, and says, “How about a compromise?”

Wylan looks at Jesper’s hand, still on the cushion. The lamplight trails his dark skin like a dusting of gold. It’s a very nice hand, slender-fingered and capable, equally deft with cards and revolvers. Callused and warm to the touch.

Wylan swallows. A few steps forward, and he’s standing at the couch, looking over Jesper. For once, he’s the one with the height advantage.

He ought to say something teasing, flirtatious. He finds that he can’t. When he reaches for smooth-polished words to cast, his mind goes to moments instead. Jesper at the piano with his mother, making her laugh with outrageously improvised lyrics. Jesper, eyes lit with righteous fire, arguing recalcitrant merchants into submission. Jesper, transforming words etched on paper into legible meaning for him, day after day, betraying nothing like impatience.

A sudden feeling flares through Wylan. “I—”

Sitting there with an arm slung loosely, Jesper had looked perfectly at ease. Not anymore. A furrow deepens in his brow. “Wy, what’s—”

“I don’t understand why you’re still here.” Wylan breathes in, shaky. He hadn’t known he would do this tonight.

The silence is a space to fill, but Jesper waits. Jesper, who hates waiting, waits for him.

Wylan can only stumble onward. “I just want to know why. This can’t be the life you want.” Even to his own ears, his voice sounds painfully small.

In the pause that follows, chagrin rolls over him in waves. He curses himself for asking the question at all, and again for needing an answer. He isn’t even brave enough to meet Jesper’s eye.

“You usually ask better questions,” Jesper says, standing and scattering shadows across the heavy sunken rug. _If he walks away, I won’t react_ , Wylan vows, steeling himself.

But Jesper simply stands. If it’s stubbornness that’s kept him anchored to Wylan’s side, Wylan wants to break that stubbornness. If it’s because of a promise blithely made at the peak of an adrenaline high, Wylan wants to pull the promise apart.

“You should go,” Wylan says, relentless. He knows he’s playing loose and dangerous with his words. Stopping seems impossible. “If you’re only here because you feel sorry for me, or because you think I can’t tell the difference between a whim and a promise, you should go. I want you to. I’ll hire someone to help me. It’ll be fine.” He is ashamed to feel himself starting to tremble.

When Jesper snorts in response, it’s more than a little galling. “You really think _sorry_ is what I feel about you?”

Wylan has to pause to gulp in a breath. “It would explain why…” He makes a halfhearted gesture. Uncertain of his own intent, he lets his limp hand drop halfway through.  

Jesper moves toward him—steps around to his left—and stays.

“You’re heading up a merchant empire worth a healthy hoard of millions, you’ve got the artistic chops to replicate plans to an unbreakable prison, and if you wanted to, you could rig up a bomb that would decimate this entire district in a blink. Also, you play a mean flute, and kiss like you were blessed by the saints. Come on, Wy. _Sorry_ is the last thing I’d feel about you." 

Wylan looks away, the movement jarring to his muscles. He realizes he’d been holding himself stiff, braced against an unwarned spill of feeling. Tears are no longer a threat, but his face is flushing again, and he’s not sure if it’s because he’s angry or flustered. “You haven’t answered the question.”

After a moment, Wylan feels, rather than sees, Jesper’s hand come up to cup his neck. His fingers rest there, light.

Wylan can feel the weight of Jesper’s arm against his shoulder blades. He can feel the heat of Jesper’s closeness. The heat is insistent, emanating from Jesper’s body, difficult to distinguish from the heat in Wylan’s own face. It’s something about being held like this, in a way edging toward possession. He never wanted sympathy, but this isn’t that. So he stays, too.

Jesper is close enough that if Wylan turned, their foreheads might touch. But Jesper leans in closer still, like he has a conspiracy to share. Like they’re planning another elaborate heist together and their fates are threaded tight.

Voice low, Jesper says, “I like the work.”

Startled, Wylan steps back, looking askance at Jesper. “No you don’t.”

“No,” Jesper says, strangely calm. The air feels dangerously thin, like the fragile, crumbling moment before combustion. “ _You_ don’t.”

Wylan can only stare. It’s as though his mind is rusted machinery, slow and creaking and laboring to run.

Jesper says, “Am I wrong?” It doesn’t sound like an accusation. It sounds like an offer.

The moment of stillness lasts for a long time. Distantly, Wylan thinks he’s never seen Jesper keep so still for so long before.

Some part of Wylan wishes he could heave the truth back into the shadows of his brain, but it’s too late for that. Whatever he does now, it will loom in his mind, exposed and raw. He knows his answer. Now he knows Jesper knows it too.

“No,” Wylan says. The words are slow to leave him. “But… it doesn’t matter.” He was a pampered merch’s son, his life set prettily for him, a sure but narrow path carved out. Then an outcast, a chess piece in a game. Every footstep checked by the need to survive. Now that he’s regained a semblance of the future he once thought he’d have, he doesn’t know what to do with it.

What he wants, desperately, is to sit. In a single movement, he pulls away from Jesper and drops onto the couch.

A long second crawls past them, marked only by the slow sway of candlelight.

He isn’t Inej, or Jesper, or Nina or Kaz. He has no calling to see through, no vengeance to seek, no promises to fulfill. He has everything, but none of it is his. It’s a stupid, selfish thing to feel, and he knows it. So he’ll keep signing ledgers. He’ll keep balancing accounts. He’ll keep reviewing contracts of exchange, no matter how little he likes it. Managing this empire is his one offering to the world.

There is too much to consider. Wylan closes his eyes. He has no desire to think, not right now. He’ll have to eventually, but not right now.

Finally, not knowing what else to do, Wylan says, “Show me Inej’s letter.”

He feels the couch sag to his right. When he opens his eyes, Jesper is holding the sheaf of papers out to him.

Wylan takes them and lays them out like the precious artifacts that they are, three pages in total.  The letter strokes mean nothing, but there is no mistaking the author of the pages spread before him. Inej’s hand is a brief, delicate thing. Ink bleeds each page like the work of a thousand tiny knife-cuts.

“See anything interesting?”

Wylan recognizes his name, at least, and traces that first line. The paper is rough beneath his finger. He now knows what meaning it bears. Maybe that’s enough. “I can still appreciate the aesthetics of the written word, you know.”

“How about the aesthetics of other things?” Wylan can hear the venturing smile in Jesper’s voice.

“Other things too,” Wylan says. Boldness strikes him. It’s better than thinking. “People, sometimes.”

Jesper’s lounge at the end of the couch is easy, on the verge of loosening into a full-on sprawl. Anyone else would have been seized tight by the tension in the room. Not Jesper. He remains, simply, himself.

Jesper’s limbs are long enough that, in other circumstances, their incursion into Wylan’s space could maybe be excused as carelessness. Maybe. Then Jesper shifts, bringing the two of them close. Wylan swallows. He feels Jesper’s leg press against his, warm and intent.

Wylan slips a glance at Jesper, and feels his breath catch. In the sparing light, Jesper’s gray eyes are like flint. Jesper is himself like flint, sparking the impossible into existence.

He ends up looking at Jesper for longer than he means to, but Jesper meets his gaze without breaking it. A faint smile edges onto Jesper’s lips, and a moment later, he’s reaching forward to brush a curl of hair out of Wylan’s eyes. The gaze, the smile, the gesture—it’s all strangely gentle, and Wylan’s chest tightens. 

“Jes, wait,” Wylan says. Because it’s been three months, but it will be an age before he gets used to being the sole subject of Jesper’s crackling focus. Because he’s still not sure he believes what Jesper insists to be true, and if he thinks about it more, he’s afraid he’ll believe it even less. “What I don’t like—it can’t matter. I’ve decided it can’t. But what _you_ don’t like—I couldn’t be the one to force you into a life you don’t want.”

Words are harder to trust. Too many times, Wylan has been told things that simply aren’t true. But there’s a look on Jesper’s face that makes Wylan think, _I can trust that, if nothing else_. Something in his chest shivers and cracks, liquid and aching and hot.

“No offense, Wy,” Jesper says, leaning in, affection softening his features, “But that sounds like a crock of horseshit to me.”

It’s not their first time, nor their second, nor third, but the previous times don’t seem to matter at all. They couldn’t have done this, kissed like this, hungry and honest, in the moments, days, months that preceded this one. This feels safer, better, with this fragment of truth revealed between them, the sky darkened to black outside, candlelight just bright enough for Wylan to catch glimpses of Jesper’s hands cupping his face, Jesper’s lidded eyes, his neck, his skin, before Wylan closes his eyes again and lets himself sink into the kiss.

When Jesper pulls back, Wylan reluctantly opens his eyes to find a familiar fervency in Jesper’s expression. This is Jesper, his eye trained on a target he has no intention of missing.

“Wy, listen. The stuff I said earlier—I didn’t say it just to humor you, or to make you feel better. I don’t mind this life, at least not for now. It’s novel, being backed by the establishment, and there’s sweet justice in getting to watch powerful men twist themselves up in their own greed. But you—you like making things, or breaking them down. Not keeping them the same.”

Wylan drops his hand to Jesper’s shoulder. “I couldn’t just leave this all behind.”

“You wouldn’t have to. There are ways.”

“So, then what? Do we just drop everything and sail across the sea? Travel the world with no responsibility to anyone?” The words come out angry and rushed. But as they leave him, Wylan realizes—the idea remains, cool and serene in his mind, like purified water in the hollow of a bowl.

Jesper’s fingers twitch, as though itching to respond. In the bruising pause, Wylan allows himself, finally, to think. He thinks, and imagines, and the idea bubbles like a spring.

He nearly misses it when Jesper says, “Would you like that?” in a way that seems utterly, helplessly real.

Wylan stares. “You mean—”

Jesper’s hand moves to the inner lining of his jacket, and Wylan realizes.

“Oh,” Wylan says, quiet.

They’re tickets. Jesper is holding tickets. They are unmistakable, _Weddle, Novyi Zem_ the destination on one set, _Os Alta, Ravka_ the destination on the other.

The nervousness is naked on Jesper’s face. “Premature?” Jesper says. He’s trying for arch but barely manages it. “Maybe. But you know me—I’d rather take the gamble.”

Slowly, silently, Wylan pulls the tickets from Jesper’s hand. They’re printed on the stiff vellum of expensive documentation and stamped with a spate of official insignias. He’d known Jesper’s stocks were faring well, but he hadn’t known about this.

“Before you accuse me of impulsivity and negligence… I can sell the tickets. If you don’t want this.” Jesper lifts a hand to his temple, then drops it abruptly. It’s the most common of tells, and he’s doing nothing to hide it. “It’s okay, you know. If you don’t want this.”

“No,” Wylan says. He can’t help but begin to smile. When Jesper matches him with a tentative smile of his own, it makes Wylan smile even harder. “I think… I think maybe I do.”

Some days with Jesper, Wylan feels like he’s fumbling his way through the dark. Jesper’s a toppling force to everything Wylan knows, ferocious and whiplash quick and fearless. Somehow, it works. He wouldn’t know how to put it, but whatever this is, it feels deep and vast, like the sea and sky at night, fathomless in unison.

“You’re telling me my wild gamble paid off.”

“This time,” Wylan says, reaching forward to take Jesper’s hand.

Jesper’s fingers tighten around his. His lightning grin is back. It’s brilliant. “Jackpot.”

 


End file.
